How Will Social Media Affect us in the Future?

With social media marketing making its presence known throughout the internet, we might ask ourselves: How will social media affect the future? In the past few years we have seen the skyrocketing popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace, the rise in search engine usage from sites like Google and the increase in blogs and social media/News sites such as Digg.com. Social media is clearly not a trend and is here to stay–so much that we have seen the continuity of the evolution of social media. Political debates have made their way onto Youtube, and candidates are creating Myspace pages, while people are free to blog about whatever interests them–whether political or not.

Perhaps social media sites will bring forth what has been described as the democratization of the media. The power is in the hands of people looking for specific information, and those people are internet users. As a result of the rise in social media, it is no longer necessary to look at bigger news companies to get up to date information on what is going on in the world, but now we can go to our favorite blogger and read her/his opinions on the issue. We can even voice our opinions on our own blogs!

The only issue with social media becomes having our voices heard. How do these blogs and sites become prominent in the public eye? Social media sites continue to find ways to capture their audiences, but a lot of their traffic is generated through word of mouth. This once again proves the power of internet users.